Five Poems from Quarantina
By Kit Robinson
THE FOURTH OF JULY
Leaves of interdependence
Birds depend on air
Songs depend on ear
I depend on you
You depend on me
We are interdependable
Like the flora & fauna
Of whom we are a part
Like mountains & rivers
Upon works of art
7/4/20
PREMIER ETUDE
The mind moves
As water moves
In waves
Wind at their back
The mind moves
As fire moves
In lines
Under heavy smoke
The mind moves
As earth moves
Spinning
Through darkness and light
The mind moves
As the body moves
On two legs
One step at a time
The mind moves
As the planets move
Elliptically
Around the sun
9/15/20
WHAT IS A TREE?
What is a tree?
A tree is a premature book
In its leaves I read
The history of the future
More specific than you would have ever thought
What is a chair?
A chair is an empty person
Relaxing in part sun
Part shade to wind chimes
Touching in the breeze
What is a fence?
A dead leaf in a knothole
Would have you believe
In the inexhaustibility
Of phenomena
What is a line?
It connects two points and droops a little in the middle
To describe a shallow curve
With no towels hanging from it
In bright sun
What is a cone?
A dirty orange traffic warning
Next to a concrete block
With a white plastic cap
The base for an umbrella
What are flowers?
Black-eyed Susan climbing over the fence
Snow-in-summer
Deep red geraniums at home among rocks
Kids on break from Zoom
10/14/20
2021: SPACE DECAMERON
We are companions in the disaster
War, corruption, drought, fire & plague
What else is new?
What binds the I to what’s seen?
My dream a drink with Ron Carter
We’re all astronauts now
Living in a bubble with our pod mates
Real and imagined
As in Tarkovsky’s Solaris
Or Sun Ra’s Rocket Number Nine
Space is the place
We occupy and contain
In equal and opposite measure
The I contains multitudes
Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness
Have you had breakfast?
Clean your bowl
Emptiness is the mother of all
1/2/21
VARIANT FOOT
The second shot
I got a buzz
A safety high
“The world goes round
And the other side comes up
So now I can’t write what I felt”
A surplus of incidents
Between talking and driving
Tale of the missed turn
At least somebody
Stood up for the music
I find patches of it now and then
Now we can even hear
Wind on Mars
Calling us home
Hello? Hello?
The piano lays out
The horn continues on alone
Quiet, I hear footprints
The last comedian
Hanging out by the hat check
A blues as casual
As seasonal labor
Lights up the night sky
It’s been a long year
A ghostly time
And still we walk among the dead
From day to day
That’s what a day is
A frame for multiple viewpoints
Somewhere along the way
I started writing
In a more accessible way
More communicative
I guess you could say
But always with something else
Something more
Than can be easily said
Of a return to earth
The singer speaks
From the heart
The chorus responds
With affirmation and consent
We were here all along
Even as we hurried along
2/24/21
Kit Robinson is a Bay Area poet, writer, and musician. He is the author of Thought Balloon (Roof, 2019), Leaves of Class (Chax, 2017), Marine Layer (BlazeVOX, 2015), and twenty other books of poetry. His essays on poetics, art, travel, and music may be found online at Open Space and Nowhere.
Read next: Poetry by Michelle Naka Pierce